Smileys should be BBC tags

[MrPhil]

It was a very poor design decision to have "smiley faces" out as unprotected bare text. They should be entered as proper BBC tags (e.g., [:-)] or [sm.happy1] or [sm.:-)]. This way, I won't enter four question marks for emphasis (what' this????) or put an "8" up against a ")" and get nasty surprises.

Yeah, yeah I know, Additional Options... > Don't Use Smileys, but it doesn't help when I want to mix smileys and sequences-not-to-be-smileys in one posting, or I'm not deliberately using smileys and neglect to do a preview because I didn't use any BBC tags.

Of course, old postings with "bare" smileys will not show up as smileys, but perhaps the posting timestamp (and "don't use smileys" flag) could be queried to "grandfather in" old postings.

[Peter Duggan]

Yeah, yeah I know, Additional Options... > Don't Use Smileys, but it doesn't help when I want to mix smileys and sequences-not-to-be-smileys in one posting

Just to let you know that you're not alone here, I've previously posted a suggestion to the Team Boards for an escape character for smileys for exactly that reason!

[Thantos]

Admin -> Smileys and Message Icons -> Enable customized smileys (check that)
Admin -> Smileys and Message Icons -> Edit Smileys
On the Edit Smileys page go through and change the code and add [] around it.

[MrPhil]

Interesting, Thantos, and useful for my own boards. Now, how do I do this if I'm not the Administrator? That is, I'm just a member of a random SMF board? My suggestion is for all smiley collections to use [], but I presume there's no way to enforce it other than for those distributed by Simple Machines?

[karlbenson]

Ask your admin, maybe they havent even thought of it.

On my forum I've changed them all to :happy: to avoid the problem with standard smilies.

[Thantos]

For the majority of boards the current smiley implementation is good.  I'm sure that for some boards it isn't adequate, but for that they can change the code.

I think one of the biggest reasons not to change it is because most people are familiar with the current method.  It follows the tradition that was used when text smilies were first displayed.  So to change it now would be anti-intuitive.

One thing I've thought about is either expanding [nobbc] to cover smilies also or adding a [nosmiley] tag that would operate in a similar manner but just for smilies.

[Peter Duggan]

It was a very poor design decision to have "smiley faces" out as unprotected bare text.

Must point out that automatically-converting smileys are the de facto standard and not just an SMF thing. But I've also been caught out by them on other systems, sometimes prefer to use a standard text smiley when I don't like what it's changing to, always turn them off in email clients (NB I only send/receive email as plain text) and feel much the same way about *bold* being rendered bold and so on. So I don't really like them but, as Thantos says, they're expected... which is why I suggested an escape character rather than a whole-scale assimilation into BBC.